Category: Apple Outsider

Tim Cook began the WWDC 2014 keynote promising “the mother of all releases for developers” and “the biggest release since the launch of the App Store.” He was not exaggerating. In a 30 minute span, Apple knockednearlyeveryitem off the community’s list of wishes and complaints. As I said on the Debug podcast last week, it’s as big a Monday as I can remember for developers. And I can remember quite a few.

Releases like this don’t come often, because the decisions and effort behind them aren’t applied lightly. The massive technical and political change required and subsequently generated by things like extensibility, third-party keyboards, and a new programming language, bears massive risk both inside and outside of Apple. That risk — to security, to battery life, to a consistent experience that customers know and trust — was constantly evaluated when I fought for SDK enhancements as a Technology Evangelist inside Apple. And more often than not, it was decided either that the risks were too high, or that there wasn’t enough time to solve the problem while sufficiently containing those risks.

Apple caught up with itself this year. As with the first iPhone OS and SDK, the consumer experience (iOS 7) took priority, and developers had their day a year later. Apple has decided that moving iOS forward is as much in developers’ hands as it is in Apple’s. Consider that all this is happening at a time when Apple has more money and is hiring more engineers than ever. If anything, Apple is more suited to shut the doors and go it alone. But that’s not what’s happening.

And it seems to be coming from a place of confidence rather than concession. It wasn’t just the announcements themselves, or the energy behind them. It was the energy from first-time attendees who made up 70% of the crowd. It was the energy from employees when I spoke to them in the conference halls and after hours. It was Craig Federighi sitting on the floor during sessions and taking pictures with everybody who lined up. It was the easing of the conference and pre-release NDA. Apple seems just as excited as developers about this new era. And yet despite this shift, true to old form, nearly everything remained secret until showtime.

This was my first WWDC since 2011. That keynote was Steve Jobs’ last, and it lacked the excitement needed to counter his visible lack of energy. Responses to the events since (and perhaps even a few prior events) paled in comparison to the response we saw last week from press and developers alike. Apple has needed time to cope not just with losing Steve, but with the idea that Apple wouldn’t be his company anymore.

That process began some time before October 5, 2011. It ended on June 2, 2014. Josh Topolsky kind of said it, Ben Thompson kind of said it, so let’s just say it:

The “Continuity” suite of features says more to me than anything else announced last week, naturally blurring the line between Mac and iPhone and iPad while still accepting each product for what it is. Recent updates to OS X seemed intent on forcing iOS down the Mac’s throat. Last week, for what felt like the first time ever, the two were on equal footing: an Apple device is an Apple device is an Apple device. This shot of creativity, connectivity, integration, and inclusion points to drastic change from within. When I wrote “Regime Change” in 2012, nearly everyone assumed the title referred to the fall of Scott Forstall. It in fact referred to the rise of Tim Cook.

What we saw at WWDC 2014 was built by thousands of people. The leadership at the top empowered those people to not only proceed, but to succeed. The attitude behind WWDC 2014 was one of increased openness and increased confidence — an attitude that managed to depart from the worst of the past while staying true to the best. Apple is undeniably the new company it deserves to be, and Tim Cook’s stewardship is on full display. I’m as excited for the future we haven’t yet seen as I am for the one we were just shown in San Francisco.

My familiarity with Macintosh came relatively late in life. Our first computer was a Commodore PET, which my father, a math teacher, borrowed from his school. It was replaced by an IBM PC Jr, then a PS/2. My dad taught me some Turbo Pascal, and then that was it. We never got another computer. We were a DOS house, and I barely saw a GUI until 1995, when I left for college.

I had seen a few Macs, but most of them were very old. So when I got to college and saw my friend Seth’s PowerMac 7100/66, I was shocked. The screen is so big! It has color! It does things other than print layout! I was hooked. I bought a Mac within weeks. My dad thought I was nuts.

These were the days when built-in Ethernet was largely unheard of, and yet Macs had them. Most computers in the dorm didn’t even have a modem. The World Wide Web was just starting to become a phenomenon. The Yahoo! homepage was a grey, HTML 2.0 mess. There was no spam.

We didn’t just have Ethernet, though. We had AppleTalk. Every Mac user in every dorm was a click away, and not only could we share files, but through a System 7 Chooser extension called BroadCast, we could message each other in realtime. It was IM before IM.

Then, of course, there was Marathon, which also supported AppleTalk. We badged our BroadCast usernames with |M| so complete strangers would know who was up for a game.

“M?”

“Sure”

“Join”

So here we were in 1995 playing spontaneous eight-man networked deathmatches. Every night. All night. People came to our doors asking us to turn the volume down — and to stop screaming at each other.

But for me, it was more than games and chats and word processors and desktop pictures and custom icons. I wanted to understand why Apple thought RISC processors were better than CISC. How those menus and windows got on the screen. How I could make my own. And so I started flunking classes because I was too busy coding for no discernible reason. At that point, my father, bless him, said “I think you need to make a decision.” I went into college an aspiring veterinarian. I came out an aspiring software developer. The rest is, well, now I’m where I am.

The Mac made me excited about technology again. It changed and shaped my life in just about every way.

A few years after I graduated, I found a position at Apple that matched the skills I had scraped up to that point. Mac OS X had just been released, and Apple was still losing money. One of the interviewers (who is still there today) asked me, “How do you feel about potentially working for an underdog?”

I told him I spent all my savings on a Performa 6300CD, and then again on a PowerMac 8600. I got the job.

Sitting there on the east coast in a dirty dorm room with so much to learn, reading Guy Kawasaki’s email newsletter, it seemed so ridiculous that I’d ever be an Apple Evangelist that I didn’t even bother dreaming about it. In retrospect, it seems obvious.

The U.S. Court of Appeals made a significant and troubling decision this week: it shut down a 2010 FCC decree that prevented internet service providers (“ISPs”) from selectively enhancing or restricting traffic to certain destinations (websites, streaming services, etc.) The collective term for this idea has become known as Net neutrality.

At the very least, you should take a good look at this mock-advertisement posted by ‘quink’ on Reddit. It’s the most compelling and succinct illustration I’ve seen. Even the fine print was written with care.

The U.S. Court of Appeals made a significant and troubling decision this week: it shut down a 2010 FCC decree that prevented internet service providers (“ISPs”) from selectively enhancing or restricting traffic to certain destinations (websites, streaming services, etc.) The collective term for this idea has become known as Net neutrality.

At the very least, you should take a good look at this mock-advertisement posted by ‘quink’ on Reddit. It’s the most compelling and succinct illustration I’ve seen. Even the fine print was written with care.

Put simply: the Internet we know and depend on will become something very different. The business relationship with your provider will change its focus from consumption (how many ones and zeros came over the wire) to behavior (what kind of ones and zeros). The latter is much more discriminatory and insidious.

Quink’s illustration is far from the worst-case scenario. Have a look at your cellular bill: most of us have minute allocations for specific times of the day and week. Now imagine a future where Netflix streaming is twice as expensive after 6PM. Where a single Skype call costs as much as a monthly landline.

The privacy implications are just as chilling. A discriminatory model bakes surveillance into the way ISPs do business. Sure, your provider can snoop on your traffic right now, but nothing in the fundamental concept of delivery requires or justifies that they do. With this environment in place, the implications for privacy and anonymity tools like Tor should be obvious: they would be banned in the provider’s terms of service (how else can they know how much to charge and what to block?) and lobbyists would waste no time making them illegal.

It’s sad that this has come to an issue of courts and regulatory bodies. The real problem is that there’s nowhere else to turn. There is no tangible consumer choice. The infrastructure is effectively monopolized. It will not be possible to vote on this with your wallets: you can submit, or cancel your service. But nobody’s going to stop using the Internet — certainly not in the kind of volume that would make a dent in policy.

The picture above resonates so well because we’ve seen it before. We see these itemized, booby-trapped menus every time we buy television or phone service. So it’s quite difficult to call this vision far-fetched when you consider the people who sell us Internet connectivity are the same people who sell us television and telephone connectivity. This is absolutely the future they want. And if nothing changes, they’re going to get it.

(Update: This article originally attributed the ISP “pricing menu” image to a user on Twitter. Iain Delaney pointed out the correct source. Sadly, none of these outcomes will change the way work is stolen on the Internet.)

In the early days of the iOS-Android war, Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.” Everyone immediately anticipated patent claims against the Android OS. I doubt many anticipated claims against Google’s undiversified core business.

ArsTechnica is reporting that Rockstar, the company spawned from an Apple-Microsoft-RIM-Sony alliance which, in 2011, outbid Google for a trove of Nortel and Novell patents, has filed suit against Google:

The complaint against Google involves six patents, all from the same patent “family.” They’re all titled “associative search engine,” and list Richard Skillen and Prescott Livermore as inventors. The patents describe “an advertisment machine which provides advertisements to a user searching for desired information within a data network.”

In the early days of the iOS-Android war, Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.” Everyone immediately anticipated patent claims against the Android OS. I doubt many anticipated claims against Google’s undiversified core business.

ArsTechnica is reporting that Rockstar, the company spawned from an Apple-Microsoft-RIM-Sony alliance which, in 2011, outbid Google for a trove of Nortel and Novell patents, has filed suit against Google:

The complaint against Google involves six patents, all from the same patent “family.” They’re all titled “associative search engine,” and list Richard Skillen and Prescott Livermore as inventors. The patents describe “an advertisment machine which provides advertisements to a user searching for desired information within a data network.”

The oldest patent in the case is US Patent No. 6,098,065, with a filing date of 1997, one year before Google was founded.

If you think that sounds like nearly 95% of Google’s revenue, you’re not alone. This sole patent feels like enough motivation for Google to have won this auction at all costs. Not only did Google not win, it made joke bids. What were they thinking?

Perhaps Google wasn’t thinking. Perhaps it was woefully unprepared for the 2011 auction and lacked a sufficiently clear picture of how valuable the portfolio was — and conversely, how dangerous it would be in other hands. Or perhaps Google decided to brave court battles and ideally set a precedent that crumbles the patent troll house of cards for good. That sounds very, very risky, and doesn’t explain why it bid up to $4.4B in the first place.

It also doesn’t explain why Google paid twelve billion dollars (!!!) for Motorola just one month later. It’s harder than ever to see the Motorola purchase as anything but panic: having lost the Nortel auction, possibly not even realizing what they’d lost until after the fact, Google scrambled for countermeasures. Larry Page practically admitted as much when he announced the deal.

I’ve said this multipletimesin the past, and I’ll say it again: I don’t like this game. Rockstar looks, smells, and now acts like countless NPE’s that have done more harm than good — namely Lodsys, which has been aggressively harassing Apple’s own ecosystem. It’s extremely disappointing to see Apple facilitate this kind of behavior. At the same time, the missed Nortel auction and dubious Motorola purchase look as awful a strategic blunder as ever for Google. They kept their head in the sand for too long.

A month after announcing it, Samsung has begun advertising its Galaxy Gear “smartwatch” on television. The first ad features clips from various movies and TV shows of people talking into and tinkering with watches that were more than just watches. It concludes with a shot of someone using a Galaxy Gear. The implication was that we now finally live in the future, thanks to Samsung.

Manypeople immediately noted that the ad was reminiscent of Apple’s original 2007 ad for the iPhone, titled simply “Hello.” The easy thing to say here is that this is just another instance of Samsung aping Apple. It’s a reasonable charge, but it’s also lazy. These ads are alike in appearance and nothing more.

First, it’s only fair to point out that the “Hello” ad is not typical Apple advertising. Apple’s ads are historically plain, to the point, and focused entirely around the product itself. In “Hello”, we see the product for a split second, after a barrage of licensed content with no connection to Apple or Apple products. There’s a reason for that departure, which also must be noted, because Samsung clearly did not.

The “Hello” ad worked on a number of levels:

It was a playful introduction to the product

It set very low but still very real expectations to build perspective

It clearly demonstrated progress in technology and design

The message behind “Hello”, and its distinction from the usual Apple product advertisements, was and still is clear: You are not ready for this, so we need to formally introduce you.

The iPhone dramatically tore down our understanding of everything that preceded it: phones; computers; software; the Internet; how we consume information; how we communicate; how we are (not) beholden to gigantic infrastructure companies that basically hate us. It’s all done differently now. The Way Things Are was about to become The Way Things Were. So, “Hello.”

The Galaxy Gear ad, and the Galaxy Gear itself, convey none of this. The ad primes us with decades of fantastic expectations — expectations which just about any review of the product you can find will tell you have not been met. It also implicitly, and very ironically, shows just how lacking in vision the product itself is. The iPhone ad says, “We’re starting over.” The Gear ad says, “We tried to make that exact thing you’ve seen on TV all these years.”

One of the common cheapshots following the Gear announcement back in September was “This is what we get when Samsung doesn’t have anything to copy.” This new ad is Samsung’s reply. “I beg your pardon, we absolutely copied!” It demonstrates not just a lack of creativity in the product, but also a complete lack of awareness in its marketing.

This all stands just the same whether or not you think the TV spot is actually derivative. The problem with this ad is not that it’s ripping anyone off. The problem with this ad is that it exhibits everything wrong with Samsung as a company.

I already said most of what I think about this pairing two and a half years ago. If you get past that melodramatic headline, most of it still holds. But I liked it a lot more when the year was 2011 and the price was (even if rhetorically) free. What’s happened since then to justify going all-in now?Now all I have is a pile of questions:

1) Why was this announcement made afterthrowing Ballmer out? That news came a mere ten days ago. Combine this Nokia news with the big reorg, and you have a much more lucid claim that things are changing in a big way. If Ballmer were to announce his retirement this week, it’s a lot easier to credibly claim Microsoft is taking a new direction and that it’s time for new leadership.

2) Knowing that Ballmer is a lame duck, is this his deal, or the board’s? If it’s his deal, that straitjacket just became an iron box. If it’s the board’s deal, why is his name on the announcement? (“He’s not gone yet” is not a good answer. He’s gone.)

3) A lot of problems at Microsoft, from a poisonous adversarial culture to a lack of vision, have been illuminated in the last few weeks. Who honestly thinks this merger will solve any of them? (Bad acquisitions, by the way, are a piece of Ballmer’s legacy that has been, in my opinion, underreported since the news of his retirement broke.)

4) The Elop-as-next-Microsoft-CEO buzz has already begun. Why? How’s he done at Nokia? The only “rational” reason to have him succeed Ballmer is that he seems like an appropriate successor to Ballmer in every way — in other words, he absolutely should not get the job. Kara Swisher loves the vapor-video he apparently commissioned. I prefer Bret Victor’s take on these sort of things. Note Victor’s repeated, damning use of the v-word.

5) Nokia was already making very nice Windows Phone hardware. And the Windows Phone software, while not making a huge market share dent, has been routinely praised. What, then, has been the problem — and again, is this merger really the solution? This is easy to answer with another question: How would the Lumia line be selling if it ran Android, and without Nokia as a Google subsidiary?

6) Microsoft just disclosed it only makes $10 per Nokia phone sold. Gross margins per unit are estimated at $40. When, if ever, will this deal pay for itself? What does today’s news have to do with increasing either unit sales or device margins?

One thing must be observed: all the major mobile players — Apple, Google, Microsoft, and oh what the hell, BlackBerry — now own a top-to-bottom technology stack. Alan Kay was right as ever when he said “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

But Microsoft needs to be thinking big and ahead, and removing burdens. I just don’t think its inherent ills can be cured, or even disturbed, by this deal. Assuming nothing fundamentally changes at the top, I believe it will be a complication that only accelerates the fall of a giant.

Those words, spoken by my three-year-old immediately upon seeing it for the first time, are all anyone really needs to know about iOS 7. It’s a reimagining that catapults the system into a new era while retaining the most important intuitions built up over the last six years. So much has changed, yet the changes themselves are so basic. As Lessien wisely noted months ago, iOS didn’t need to change that much. The biggest risk was change for the sake of change: losing the efficiency that familiarity breeds.

Apple has kept all the right things, and built a new experience celebrating the values behind them. iOS 7 is truly the sum of its parts. On their own, many of these new elements — parallax, translucency, animations, motion — might seem out of place, even gimmicky. Together, they put forth a clear vision, one Continue reading “Real”

Those words, spoken by my three-year-old immediately upon seeing it for the first time, are all anyone really needs to know about iOS 7. It’s a reimagining that catapults the system into a new era while retaining the most important intuitions built up over the last six years. So much has changed, yet the changes themselves are so basic. As Lessien wisely noted months ago, iOS didn’t need to change that much. The biggest risk was change for the sake of change: losing the efficiency that familiarity breeds.

Apple has kept all the right things, and built a new experience celebrating the values behind them. iOS 7 is truly the sum of its parts. On their own, many of these new elements — parallax, translucency, animations, motion — might seem out of place, even gimmicky. Together, they put forth a clear vision, one that’s reinforced by one of the best marketing videos I think Apple has ever made. Even considering Apple’s famously deliberate style, the choice and use of words in this video (and other WWDC materials) stand out: Clarity. Depth. Vitality. Detail. Deference. Realism.

It’s the realism I want to talk about. John Gruber calls it “A real thing, not pixels rendered on glass.” Rene Ritchie says “iOS 7 is alive.” This is the sort of update I was hoping iOS 5 would be nearly two years ago.

What took so long? I think it was a combination of hardware and momentum. Not so long ago, Steve Jobs was telling users that wallpapers were too slow. The deep animations and real-time blur effects you see between layers in iOS7 are all hardware-intensive operations. The tug of war between “realistic” design and hardware limitations led to an early compromise of false illusions — shadows, bevels, borders. Once these trends are in place, it’s hard to buck them.

Now the hardware has caught up, and the Apple design team has a new leader. We don’t need the deception of “photorealism” anymore. Despite the loss of these tricks, iOS 7 feels more real. The parallax effect conveys an entire living world under that glass, not just abstract pictures and icons. This is reinforced by the launch and quit animations: your eye never loses sight of where you’re going, or where you came from. You are moving through this world. There is almost no change in context, ever.

The emphasis on text is also striking. More than just content, text has replaced iconography in many cases. Look at Camera: the modes — VIDEO, PHOTO, SQUARE, PANO — are represented by text for the first time ever on iOS. This to me is proof that “clarity” has taken top priority. iOS is available in a number of countries and languages, which means every piece of text has to be localized (translated) many times over. This isn’t only time consuming, it’s disruptive to UI design: a short word in English is not necessarily short in German, and suddenly things don’t fit on screen anymore. I attended many meetings at Apple where people cringed at changing a word shortly before release, because it meant a whole new round of localize-then-build-then-test.

Icons avoid this problem — when done right. They speak no language, which is to say every language. Or they can only speak a few. The truth is, images have nearly as much cultural variance as text. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a single word is worth a thousand pictures. That realization, raised above any logistical or procedural consequences, tells me just how serious this new philosophy is.

Facebook Home is coming. It’s a unique threat to Google’s mastery of Android that Google can blame nobody but itself for. It’s the unique nature of the threat — both Home’s technical foundation, and the nature of Facebook’s rivalry with Google — that I believe makes Home the first real test of Google’s “open” mantra regarding Android.

There have been many challenges to date, but most of them involve “forks” of the Android system: where another company builds their own system on top of a previous Android release. Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble’s nook, and Samsung’s rumored / assumed proprietary fork are all notable examples of Android derivatives. None of these to date have looked poised to take Android away from Mountain View anytime soon. Samsung, with its market share momentum and marketing prowess, could stand to be a significant threat, but for now its flagship products still run Google’s “stock” Android, more or less.

Facebook Home can only reside on Android because only Google was daft enough to allow it.

I’d add “for now.” Now we get to see how true to its ethos Google and Android stay. How long will Home remain on the Google Play store? How often, and how mysteriously, will it have “compatibility issues” with new releases? How long before launchers in general start to get buried under convenient categorization?

At the least, I expect an increased emphasis from Google on the virtues of “stock” Android, and an increased push to make that consistent for consumers. This is already underway on both OEM and developer fronts, but Facebook’s lurking presence will force the issue that much harder.

Home’s to-be-determined success could also force Apple’s hand. Such a product is neither technically nor legally feasible on iOS at the moment, and Facebook’s integration into iOS 6, while powerful, is much less than Facebook Home provides on Android, and thus presumably much less than Facebook wants on iOS. As I said last week, if too many consumers start considering Facebook Home a deal breaker, Apple may need to make some moves of its own. How many consumers that is, and whether they’ll in fact get on board, remains to be seen. All of this just underscores what’s at stake for everyone — Facebook most of all. With just one announcement, Facebook has made itself a strategic stakeholder in the mobile landscape. It’s no longer just a website and an app.

Google knew what it was doing when it made and marketed Android as an “open” system. It surely anticipated forks by handset makers as a manageable risk as long as Google kept advancing the system. But I wonder if it expected something like Facebook Home: an inside-out heist, made by a company after the same exact user data and advertisers Google is after. How it chooses to respond in the near future should give us an answer.

You’ve built an enormous business around a desktop website. Unfortunately, people around the world are spending more and more time on mobile devices. The vast majority of these devices run software from only two companies. One of these companies is actively competing with you.

You cannot put your future in a competitor’s hands. So what do you do? Do you enter uncharted territory, make your own mobile operating system, and hope people switch?

Of course not. You make your competitor’s system yours — overnight. Facebook Home is a trojan horse designed to steal the Android experience, and the Android user base, right out of Google’s hands. The majority of speculation over the last year or two had been that Facebook was working on its own mobile OS. It may well be, but this move is so much smarter on a number of fronts:

Time. Home significantly increases Facebook’s mobile presence without being everything. A lot of time and care seems to have gone into it, but it’s surely far less than a full-blown operating system would require.

Installed base. Built in. The sales pitch is very simple: If you have a device that Home supports, download it. No money, no switcher headaches. Blackberry and Windows Phone sales prove that people aren’t looking for new platforms right now.

Software Experience. Facebook’s engineers have surely learned a lot from this project. That experience will be reapplied not only to expanding Home itself, but to building a full-blown OS if they want.

Hardware Experience. While the software is the real news here, Facebook took the initiative to also start working with a handset maker. The HTC First is hardly a “Facebook phone”, but it’s a chance for Facebook to experience the complexity of coordinating hardware, software, and carrier partnerships from a distance. Remember the Motorola ROKR? Remember what happened fifteen months later?

Facebook has loudly and confidently entered an arena it has no prior experience in, and has set a clear path to expand its influence at its own pace. Facebook Home will provide a halo effect to current Android users that warms them up to a full-blown “Facebook phone” in the years to come. It gives Facebook the experience, confidence, credibility, momentum, and time to build a better and broader mobile experience than they would have been able to build otherwise. It’s as prudent as it is ambitious.

I think we’ll know well before the end of this year how Facebook Home affects handset sales. If buyers start asking “does it have Facebook Home?” — and I think many will — that will be bad news for both Google and Apple. However, the Google – Facebook war is sure to be more vicious than the Google – Apple war because Google and Facebook have the same customers: advertisers. Users are their currency, and Facebook is about to rob the bank.

I was honored to be the guest on Episode 9 of Debug with my friends Rene Ritchie and Guy English. We talked about the values and principles that make a difference when building software, the unsung heroes of a successful project, the price of deferring the wrong bugs, and other geeky things.

You should check out the previous episodes as well. Rene and Guy have managed to get great guests every time. Until this week, at least.

SeriouslyMac is curated by Keith Teare of chat.center. The top Mac blogs are monitored. It is intended as a convenience for those who want to monitor the ever-changing Apple ecosystem - both in terms of the products, the people and the ideas underlying their activities.
For more information see http://s.erious.ly or chat with me live through chat.center at chat.center/kteare.